A national suture

I have six sutures snaking across my upper back. The stitches look to have been sewn with navy blue fishing line, pulled taut and tied off into a grimace atop a fleshy ridge. Tomorrow they’ll be removed. By all accounts the wound has been beautifully closed by skilled hands. But really, what does that mean? Does it mean it will heal well? Look pretty on the surface? Smooth and soft, demure like a slight smile?

So much of life is never what it appears to be. Marriage is more constantly challenging, motherhood more regularly enervating, driving times but estimates failing to take into account traffic, other drivers’ skills or lack of, accidents, weather.

Our “president” is even worse than he seemed at first, a greedy buffoon with bad hair, bad ties, orange skin, and dubious business success. He is, in fact, a truly horrible, greedy, mean narcissist who still has bad hair, bad ties, orange skin, and dubious business everything. He is a bigot, a racist, a liar, and a fraud.

It has been hard to be back here. Hard to return to swastikas and white supremacists and the pardoning of a man who unabashedly targeted minorities and made them suffer. It has been almost impossible to watch our “leader” make equivalent the neo-Nazi racists and those who peacefully (and even less peacefully) opposed them. There is no equivalent. None.

It has been hard to watch brave men and women who've fought in our military be suddenly banned from service because they are transgender. It has been sickening to hear bullshit claims that their medical costs are too much of a burden to this country, not worth their courage and service, when in fact our military spends five times that amount on Viagra and our deplorable “leader” has already spent more on personal travel.

The stitches itch something fierce and the skin around them is raw and red, irritated by the bandage adhesive keeping them slicked with ointment and padded and covered.

The country aches something fierce and so many are raw and red, furious and exhausted by the fight since our birth, since the Civil War, since emancipation, since suffrage, since battles for Civil Rights and Women’s Rights and reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. Like the worst sort of full circle we have a "leader" - with bad hair and bad ties and orange skin and the meanest streak - who wants to take us back to before, to the time of our birth. To the time when only he and men who looked like him, potentially minus the orange skin, could succeed or even hope to.

Friends and family and millions of strangers spent the past few days battening down for and enduring Hurricane Harvey. It has been a Katrina redux to watch Houston flood. And our “president”? He pardoned a racist crook, banned willing and brave service members, and tweeted a book review on the day the rain started to fall. As if that imbecile reads anything booklength or not about him. He flew south during the campaign although he was asked not to. He’s barely said boo to Texas, a state that handed him its electoral votes, since Friday and might go visit on Tuesday.

While in the Netherlands I got to spend time with a friend there. She was lamenting her daughter’s nearly-six-week summer break; summers are tough for working parents. Who watches their children? Where? For how much? I said, I understand, we have twelve weeks.

Summer is now officially long in the tooth. I’m sick of it. The next eight days will be a slog, an uncomfortable fishing line grin snaking across the remains of August. The rose-colored summer break is at once marvelous and not at all what it appears to be.

And yet this is life. There is a PE uniform to buy (late) and braces to be set and schedules to be made. There is the weeding of the garden, the removal of all whose season has passed, the extra love given to all who persevere in the blurry pages between summer and fall. Perhaps we’ll get some more tomatoes, squash, and melons. But the arugula is long gone, the peppers and okra now wisps of hope. The birds have stolen all of the berries, and I have stopped fighting them. For this year at least.

I will try to find my way back to activism but also to the simpler things that enable me to better care for myself and my family. This fight is going to be a long one, and we all must both protest and pace. It will, potentially, take generations to undo and heal some of what Trump has wrought. But he is not the only one to blame.

This country has never adequately reckoned with its racist birth and past and the ways in which those old tentacles reach insidiously into the present. That failure allowed such a heinous individual to (sort of) win a presidential election, and if we, white America, do not deal with our wrongs now, we are as complicit as ever in laying the groundwork for another Trump in the future.

Stitches may capably close a wound but talented hands don’t ensure the underlying ill is excised. A lovely scar can mask ugliness. Just ask America.

Anne Frank House and Charlottesville

Last Thursday, Mom, Tom, the boys, and I spent the morning at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Although we knew the story, although I studied the Holocaust extensively in college, although I thought I knew what to expect, we all of us were rendered silent and emotional. We each listened intently to the audio tour, bearing witness to the horrors and courage and human spirit the Frank family (and millions of others) endured and demonstrated. 

Today, just two days later, I am back in America and watching with a heavy, outraged, disgusted heart the white supremacists marching and beating peaceful counter-protestors in Charlottesville, VA. Governor McAuliffe has declared a state of emergency, three are dead, dozens are injured. And that's just the physical damage. Imagine the psyches of Americans of color right now, as white men and woman wave confederate flags and scream about "taking our country back." Imagine how Jews watching Americans raise their arms in Sieg Heil salutes, swastikas waving at their sides (see below) must feel. 

72 years separates the end of World War II and now. 72 years. 72 years since Anne Frank was murdered after hiding for two years in a dark annex. 72 years since the hate-filled Hitler took his own life in cowardly fashion. Less than that between the turbulent Civil Rights movement in America and now. What are we doing? 

I am nearly speechless. I am sick to my stomach and desperately sad to be back in this country after enjoying two weeks in beautifully progressive, largely tolerant places. I'll leave you with this, courtesy of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. 

Dear America,

Dear America,

Growing up, I learned that you were exceptional in pretty much every way. You were discovered by righteous white Europeans seeking a place to live openly. They were tired of being oppressed, tired of being unable to practice their religions freely, tired of being under a monarch's thumb. And so they bravely sailed west.

These settlers loved the Indians and were sorry to kill so many of them with illness they brought from their home countries. The ones they massacred so that they could more easily steal the native's land, well, that was for the greater good and all. I mean, they needed the good land to farm and build houses on. And the Europeans thought the native Americans were not as smart, that they were primitive and simple, and so they look a few lessons from them before kicking them away. At some point there was a lovely, communal Thanksgiving with cornucopias and bounty, and everything was jovial and fine after that as long as the red man stayed away on the parcels of land those Europeans so generously gave them.

And wow, then the settlers found cotton and just loved how it grew. But gosh, it was hard to grow and pick. So were sugar cane and tobacco. And so there was a great idea to outsource labor. Slaves! Just the ticket. Slaves can be sold for lots of money and then work for free. Man do the economics sound great. Also, slaves are pretty dispensable, and when you kidnap them en masse and don't really care how many make it from Africa to here, you can just keep on kidnapping and hauling and kidnapping and hauling. Dump the dead, sell the rest. 

See, Africans, like the native Americans, were also considered simple, dumb really. Immoral, barbarous, in desperate need of minding and structure and hard work. They weren't whole people, only partial. Maybe 3/5. The settlers knew best. They always did. And so really, it was an act of loving kindness to give the black animals work, routine, expectations, rules. They were given housing and food too. It was sort of an ideal situation and gosh, America, you thrived. Just grew and thrived like nobody's business.

Meanwhile, women were forced into their rightful places in the home. Why on earth would women need or want to vote, think, or be educated? Their minds weren't sophisticated enough to hold most jobs, and have mercy, there were babies to be had. Keeping them in the home was the best way to honor their maternal abilities, the best way to keep any dormant hysteria at bay. It was a fine celebration of reproductive vessels. The women wanted to be appreciated, right? Boy did you do that, America.

Then some Americans started to think this slavery thing was wrong and also some crazy women wanted to vote. Honest Abe figured out how to get enough folks on board with abolition, and the Confederacy accepted his decision peacefully. All the white slave owners were paid when their slaves were set free because really, they lost a lot of money when their human property was taken. The slaves weren't given a dime or any land or material anything and they sure as heck couldn't vote, but they were free so America and the slaves were even steven. Kumbaya.

Suffragettes worked really hard and no one called them idiots or threatened to kill them. Then women could vote. Kumbaya again. And civil rights and gay rights and women's rights and religious tolerance...sure, people may have had to fight (and some may have died) and argue, but you are America and you are so accepting. Some guy named Jim Crow, who was really bad, was even welcomed here. I mean, the first people came here for freedom so of course they wanted others to have freedom too. That's only right.

Today things are great. America is thriving, just like all that cotton once did. People get along and there is no racism or sexism, and facts are valued to the nth. A man who really isn't good at anything but lying, cheating, stealing, and being mean to people got to be President! He doesn't understand government or math or healthcare or geography! He is ugely NOT elite except that he has a lot of money. He hasn't actually made any of that money but he has it, and America, you do value money. This all goes to show that anything is possible in this great country. 

I think my education was lacking in many ways, because we really are more exceptional than I ever knew. Thanks for being you, America.

Sincerely,

Emily